Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [13]
A tripflare went off behind me–I turned around and saw ten to fifteen NVA. I yelled and at the same time the vehicle facing the enemy opened fire. The NVA were so surprised because they didn't know we were there. … I opened up with my 50 and also everyone else did on the other eight tracks. Immediately we came under small arms fire and RPG (rocket-propelled grenades), which are bad news–they can go through one side of an ACAV and come out the other! The firefight lasted about forty-five minutes. At the same time the tripflare went off we heard firing at our NDP (night defensive position) where the rest of the troop was. They were getting hit too! The NVA planned on hitting the NDP, but some of them had lagged behind and accidently tripped one of our trip-flares …
Under fire from two directions, the NVA, a platoon of twenty or so, ran through the rubber trees across the road and, like a ball in a pinball machine, they collided with the other platoon, which also took them under fire. The troop commander directed in Cobra gunships and Phantom jets:
Their shit was really flaky then…. Anyhow the next morning we went out to check our perimeter and found three bodies, and one NVA still alive but shot all to hell in the legs–he had an RPG launcher locked, loaded, and ready to fire at us, but he was too weak and scared and gave up…. We kept looking and found twenty-six 40mm mortar rounds with the nose detonators screwed in all ready to go–they were laying in a neat row right on the ground in two rows of thirteen…. We followed a length of commo wire, which was out in the rubber trees, from the mortar to a place where they had dug foxholes in to ambush us when we drove down it in the morning–there we found two more bodies…. We got hit six nights in a row up at Loc Ninh and got a total of nine kills….
In exchange, I Troop medevacked only six of their own, one with shrapnel in his eye. But with a unit of the Blackhorse's caliber, the issue was not their ability to beat the NVA nose to nose, the issue was the ability of the North Vietnamese Army to pick itself up like a clobbered boxer and swing again. This they could do.
The NVA were good soldiers, but they were not supermen. During his first tour as regimental intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Brook-shire noticed that almost all NVA foot soldiers they captured were ultimately relieved to be out of the war, and they cheerfully answered any and all questions. Only rarely did he see captured NVA officers respond to interrogation, and translations of their diaries revealed a cadre of men ideologically committed to their war who were willing to absorb any sacrifice, extended over any period of time, to achieve victory. These NVA officers were tough and dedicated, and their troops followed them to the death.
In light of the political favoritism and corruption that marked the ARVN officer corps, Brookshire saw little hope in their ally ever mustering the fighting spirit needed to go it alone. Not that he harbored any doubts about the tragedy of a communist victory, but given the determination of the enemy and the shackles fixed upon the U.S. Army by the U.S. Congress, even a hard charger like Battle Six Brookshire could appreciate the sublime irony of a correspondent's account of the end of a Big Red One operation.“The command group picked its way along a trail that wound through the jungle in the direction of Cambodia. On either side were deep slit trenches. The trenches contained rusty tins of C rations, and Diet Cola and Hamm's Beer, the legacy of the last time the Americans had